The US dropped China from its list of the world's worst human- rights violators, but added Syria, Uzbekistan and Sudan to its top 10 offenders in an annual report released on Tuesday.
Despite removing Beijing from its top blacklist, the US State Department's 2007 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices said China, which has raised hopes internationally that it would improve human rights by hosting the 2008 Olympics, still had a poor record overall.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the report aims to highlight the struggle for human rights around the world.
"In the long run, we are confident that citizens who sacrifice for their dignity and their rights will prevail, just as the Havels and the Mandelas did before them," Rice told reporters. "Change may, indeed, change will take time, but change will come."
But human-rights groups criticized the move, with Reporters Without Borders saying it was "a bad decision at a bad time" amid global moves to pressure Beijing into improving its record ahead of the August Olympics.
China had been fingered as one of the worst violators in the 2006 and 2005 reports. This year China was classified among authoritarian countries that are undergoing economic reform and rapid social change, but which "have not undertaken democratic political reform," the report said.
The State Department said in the report that "countries in which power was concentrated in the hands of unaccountable rulers remained the world's most systematic human-rights violators."
It listed 10 in that category: North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Eritrea and Sudan.
A State Department spokesman though, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters "there is no statutory significance to this list," meaning it does not legally affect the status of relations with Washington.
But the report stressed that China's "overall human-rights record remained poor" last year, citing tightened controls on religious freedom against Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang.
"The government also continued to monitor, harass, detain, arrest, and imprison activists, writers, journalists, and defense lawyers and their families, many of whom were seeking to exercise their rights under the law," the report said.
Other authoritarian countries listed as undergoing change were Venezuela, Nigeria, Thailand, Kenya and Egypt.
Human rights had improved in several countries since 2006, including Mauritania, Ghana, Haiti and Morocco, the report said.
Little or no progress had been made in Nepal, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq, Afghanistan or Russia, while the situation had deteriorated in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, it said.
It said human rights in Pakistan worsened last year despite Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's repeated pledges to foster democracy. It highlighted a period of emergency rule late last year.
In Bangladesh, the "government's human-rights record worsened, in part due to the state of emergency and postponement of elections," the report said.
In Sri Lanka, it said "the government's respect for human rights continued to decline due in part to the escalation of the armed conflict."
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